


The Death of an Atheist

by halfeatenmoon



Category: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu | The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi
Genre: Future Fic, Multi, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-06
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-29 02:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/314688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/pseuds/halfeatenmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Haruhi Suzumiya wasn't supposed to die at the age of sixteen. But she did, and Kyon's spent another sixteen years trying to forget about it. When he's forced to return to North High as a teacher, though, he has to stop ignoring what Haruhi's death did to him and his friends, and start looking towards the future.</p><p>Which would be a lot easier if not for the fact that Haruhi doesn't seem to be dead after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is going to be very long. I've been working on the draft for two years and it's still has plot threads that need to be straightened out, but I decided I want to get it finished by the end of the year, and I need an incentive to stop fiddling and do it. So I'm going to put chapters up as I finish them, because the fact that I hate seeing things left unfinished will hopefully be encouragement to get it done. I _will_ finish this by the end of the year, but I can't say how frequent the updates will be. Trust me, though. It'll happen.

I don’t know whether I ever did believe in reincarnation. Or life after death, or even, for that matter, in ghosts of the dead haunting their old homes. It’s not because I’m a sceptic, only believing in what I can see before me, although some of the things I have seen so completely defy logic that the most cynical of sceptics would never be able to explain them away.

I’ve been sceptical and fanciful by turns through my life. I’ve gone from wanting desperately for aliens, time travellers and espers to exist in my life, to refusing to believe in them at all, to being forced beyond all doubt to conclude that such things are all around me. It’s not reason that kept me from believing that a soul could live on without its body for a home. I truly think that the question had never even crossed my mind. A child doesn’t think about death. A teenager doesn’t worry about it. It’s something too far in the future to care about.

Before I turned seventeen, I never asked myself the question of what happened when we died. I learned about the spirits of my dead ancestors from my mother, sure, and how to pay proper respect to them, but I never asked myself whether there was really anything left of my great-great-grandfather to hear, or whether he would care if I passed my tests or not. I was always too busy gazing at the stars, or thinking about one girl or another at school, to worry about death. So I don’t know whether I believed in reincarnation before I was seventeen. The thought never crossed my mind.

It wasn’t until my final year of high school that I was forced to ask myself that question, and when I did, the answer was immediate, and unshakeable. I did not believe that a person could die and come back to life, and I never would. I knew, more surely than I had ever known anything before, that from the moment that Haruhi Suzumiya died, there could never be anything miraculous in the world again.


	2. Chapter 2

The morning was cool and crisp as I left my apartment, but with the sun shining and the cuffs of my trousers wet with dew, I knew it would warm up to be a bright April day. As I started to cycle through town on towards school – which seemed both longer and shorter than I remembered – I could already feel the sun warming my back and wished I could stop to take my jacket off. I didn’t want to stop for a moment, though. No matter how much I dreaded starting this job, I didn’t want to risk being late on the first day.

I thought travelling to North High would be either better or worse than I remembered it. Memories usually seem to grow or shrink as we exaggerate the past, rewriting it in the tiniest ways every time we recall it. Little things had changed, of course, which is why I set out early to make especially sure that I wasn’t late on my first day. I had a different apartment, the same general area but just a little further away than the old one. A new bike, faster than the one I used at school. The shed where I parked my bike was evidently used by more people than it used to be; I had never had to risk scratching it by jamming it in between other bikes before.

But the hill, that most distinctive feature of my daily trip to school for the most amazing, most wasted years of my life, was just the same as always. I thought that fifteen years without climbing hills would make it seem bigger, or that talking about it as though it was such an ordeal would make it seem smaller when I finally had to climb it again. Yet the climb was exactly as I remembered it. Surrounded by students in blue school uniforms, one foot in front of the other, sun in my eyes and the air already warming into a perfect spring day for the first day of school.

I didn’t want it to be a perfect day. I wanted a grey sky and an uncomfortable wind. I wanted the welcoming ceremony to end with all the students, from excited first years to third years who only thought they were wise and mature, wandering listlessly inside as the rain began.

I didn’t want to be back at North High. I didn’t want to be in Nishinomiya ever again. But after ten years as a teacher, with no savings, little pay and jobs scarce on the ground, I had run out of other options. It was North High or unemployment. I’m not the kind of person who’s committed enough to a principle to stick to it when it gets tough. I’ll complain all day long, I’ll slack off, I’ll be mediocre at everything I do, but never so much that I have to give up my comforts.

There was a time when I thought that was going to change, for the better. But now I’m worse than I ever was before.

The welcoming ceremony for the start of the year was good enough, I suppose. I didn’t sit with the other teachers, just hung at the side watching the principal speak. I hadn’t met any of the other teachers yet, and met with the principal only once. I’d been trying to avoid it. His speech was okay, but there’s not much you can say to kids on their first day of school. The most interesting thing is watching their faces. Some of them hopeful, some of them nervous, many just bored. You can probably guess that when I was fifteen I was one of the latter group. I didn’t care about school enough to be nervous, and even then I was too cynical to be hopeful. I still can’t imagine what it is about high school that gives them hope. They don’t know the misery they still have to learn. But watching them makes me wish, just for a moment, that I had been one of the hopeful ones. Maybe if I hadn’t been so negative, I would have made the most of what I had at high school, even if I still wouldn’t have realised how good it was, or how soon that happiness would end.

Especially if I’d known I would become an even more cynical bastard as an adult.

I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t notice the ceremony had ended until the students started chattering and milling towards the classroom, and I had to bolt to get to homeroom in time. At least I didn’t have to think about how to get there. I even had the same classroom that I was taught in during my first year at school. I didn’t look at my old desk. It wasn’t the same desk, or the same chair; they’d replaced them some time in the last fifteen years. The only thing that wouldn’t have changed would be the view.

My new students were still talking as they all sat down. I stood up introduced myself as quickly as possible, then sat down again so that they could introduce themselves too. And as much as I would have liked to just drift away for the next ten minutes or so, I tried to sit up and pay attention. Despite the impression I might give, I really do care about teaching. My reasons for taking it up as a career were confused at best, but it’s something I care about, something I’m good at, and something that I enjoy as much as I’m capable of enjoying anything nowadays.

I care about children. I want them to feel like at least somebody cares. It was my determination to be good at it which brought me back to the world after a year in the wilderness when I dropped out of school. I was going to learn my students’ names and care about how they were doing. I would be a teacher who made a difference to his students. I wouldn’t let any of them fall behind.

So their introductions, no matter how dull, meant it was time to get to work and stop feeling sorry for myself. I was noting down names, thinking in the back of my mind about how to start my first class and not fall behind on the lesson plan. I was so focused on the job that I barely even noticed when one of the students introduced herself as Haruhi. For years, I had flinched, stiffened and even stopped in my tracks every time I heard that name. Once, at university, I had to stand up and walk out of a class. But it’s a reasonably common name, and I’m a reasonable person. If I was going to be a teacher, I was bound to come across students with that name, and if I couldn’t help being reminded of her when I heard it, I could at least learn to stop reacting. When this student introduced herself as Takemoto Haruhi and said she had just transferred from East Junior High, I didn’t even look up from the paper I was writing on. It was just one more average girl named Haruhi. Nothing I needed to pay attention to. It was a coincidence, nothing to do with the Haruhi I had lost.

“Normal humans don’t interest me. If anyone here is an alien, a time traveller, slider, or an esper, then come find me! That is all.”

I looked up so quickly that I gave myself whiplash.

She stood with her arms crossed firmly over her chest. Her long black hair in a ponytail, tied back with a thick, bright yellow ribbon. Her lips were pressed tightly together, in utter seriousness. I couldn’t help but notice, as though my gaze were directed by that very old memory, the smooth skin of her throat. What really held me, though, were her eyes, dark and determined, with a glare to challenge every person in the room.

It was absurd, but there was no doubt about it. It was the same glare that had been fixed on me on my first day at North High, after I had heard that very first introduction. Just as Haruhi Suzumiya had done on that first day, she scanned the class slowly and stopped to glare at me, staring at her with my mouth hanging open.

Before she could sit down, though, I had fainted clean away.

How embarrassing.

 

“Kyon! What happened? Will he be okay?”

It wasn’t Haruhi’s voice that came to me through the haze of a headache as I slowly came back to consciousness, but Mikuru’s. What a thing to wake up to! It was horrendously embarrassing to have passed out in my very first class, but completely worth it if it meant that by miraculous coincidence, Mikuru had become the school nurse and was going to be the one to sit by my bedside! I thought, for the first time in years, of the way Mikuru had looked in that nurse costume so many years ago as I lazily opened my eyes...

And found my face so close to the smiling face of Koizumi Itsuki that our noses briefly grazed together.

“I didn’t think you’d be so pleased to see me, Kyon.”

With hair prickling on the back of my neck, I yelped, pulled my head away and almost hit it on the wall next to me. I was lying in a bed pushed sideways against the wall of the nurse’s office, with Itsuki chuckling as he stopped leering in my face and leaned back in his chair instead.

“What were you doing that for?” I demanded, and then groaned as my headache reminded me that it was still there. I sank back into the pillow and turned my head towards Itsuki so he hopefully wouldn’t feel the need to lean over me again.

“You’d been unconscious for a slightly concerning amount of time, Kyon,” he replied, still smiling. “I was about to check your pupils to see if there were any signs of concussion.”

“Bullshit.”

He blinked at me for a moment, and I wondered whether I’d surprised him, or shocked him, or maybe actually hurt him. I hadn’t seen Itsuki in fifteen years. Maybe he was different now. Maybe he’d dropped the mask, maybe he was sensitive now, or maybe I was meaner than before and he just wasn’t prepared for it.

After a moment, though, his usual smile returned, just as I muttered an apology.

“I took no offense,” he replied, amiably. “It’s nothing more than I should expect from Kyon. I wouldn’t have thought that your homeroom class were so difficult it would cause you illness, though.”

“I... that’s not...” I shook my head to try to clear it, then groaned and pressed a hand to my forehead. There was too much to process. “What are you _doing_ here?”

“If we hadn’t met each other at a staff meeting, we’d be asking you the same question.”

It was a familiar female voice that answered this time, and I realised that past my feet, at the end of the room, Asahina Mikuru was standing in the doorway. I think she must have been older than even the big Asahina from the future that I had met before, when she intervened back in my school days. She was sensibly dressed, in a plain, knee-length shirt with a short sleeved blouse, and her hair tied back in a ponytail with only a few wisps escaping around her ears. The smile on her face was a wry, humorous one rather than the sweet and innocent smile I used to know, but she was just as beautiful as ever.

“Mikuru...”

“Shouldn’t you be calling me Asahina-sensei?” She leaned against the door frame, the same look of amusement on her face.

“If that’s what you want,” I said, instantly, sitting up, and she laughed.

“It doesn’t bother me. Call me whatever you want. Just so long as I can still call you Kyon.”

It had been such a long time since we’d last spoken, and the circumstances had been so awkward, and so strange. I never imagined that Mikuru and I could meet again and get along so easily.

Then again, she seemed to have become a lot more like me.

Itsuki coughed, politely, and I realised I had been staring. I was doing a lot of that today. Mikuru tried to hide a chuckle behind her hand as I glanced back and forth between the two of them.

“Well, this is a lovely little reunion, but what are we all doing here?”

“I teach history,” Mikuru volunteered.

“And I’m the school nurse,” Itsuki said, with a smile.

I hope he didn’t undress me while I was out cold on the bed.

“Of course not. That would be unprofessional.” Itsuki smiled. “But to answer your earlier question, I don’t know what’s going on. When Asahina and I met at the first staff meeting last week, we thought it was simply a coincidence that we’re both working at the same school. But if you’re here, it does suggest that perhaps there’s something larger than us.”

I stared at him, and then stared at Asahina. They didn’t know? But they wouldn’t have met Haruhi yet. Of course they didn’t know.

“We’ll have to discuss this later,” Itsuki said, seriously. “Both of you should come back here at the end of the day, and then perhaps we can talk more at my house. But recess is nearly over now, so you should both probably head back to class. Kyon, I think you should be fine to go back to teaching now. Just head back here right away if you start to feel ill again.”

Mikuru shrugged and turned back towards the door, and Itsuki had already turned his wheelchair around to go back to whatever dull, everyday paperwork was lying on his desk. Was that it? Were they just going to go back to work as if nothing was wrong?

“We can’t just leave like this!”

They both turned back to stare at me as I jumped off the bed and into the middle of the room.

“What do you mean?”

“Why not? There’s no time right now.”

I paused, breathing heavily. In the shock of my world having gone so mad, I couldn’t seem to find the words.

“What about Nagato?”

They both looked at each other.

“What about her, Kyon?”

“Well, what does she teach? Or is she a technician? A secretary? Where is she?”

“She isn’t here. She wasn’t at any of the staff meetings last week, and I don’t think anyone else would have skipped them.”

“Besides, Nagato was never even human. For all we know, the Integrated Data Thought Entity might have terminated her interface...”

I still have a good five minutes of the break left, right?

I walked out of the room before Itsuki could finish, pushed past Mikuru and hit the corridor running.

This morning I had been filled with dread at the thought of coming anywhere near this school, let alone going to the club room that had been the centre of my high school life. Now I couldn’t get there fast enough. I barely saw the students I ran past on my way to the club house, except that the building itself was still busy with people checking out clubs they might like to join. But there was only one club room I cared about, down towards the end of the corridor, the one which no students were fighting to get into. The ‘literature club’ sign was still hanging above it, the same as always, and the door handle felt exactly the same under my hand.

I stepped inside, and Nagato Yuki looked up from the book she was reading, in her seat beside the window.

“Hello,” she said, quietly, an indecipherable look in her eyes behind the glasses that I hadn’t seen in an eternity. Then she looked back at her book, closed it, and stood up, patting down the creases in her blue school skirt.

I hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t expected to meet anyone familiar at all at this school, and I tried not to think about what my old school friends did these days. But in all the time we’d been apart, I never thought that Nagato would have gone back to this. That all the years I’d been watching her, befriending her, trying to help her grow into her own person and learn how to _live_ , that one day she’d go back to being the shy, almost silent first year student she was on the day I first met her. Seeing Haruhi had shocked me, but seeing the old, young, reserved Nagato again broke my heart, and I could barely croak out the words “We need to talk.”

She looked back up at me. “I need to get back to my class.”

I smiled, despite myself. “You know more than any of your teachers ever will.”

She stared at me. I didn’t need her to talk for me to understand what she was saying.

“I know, I know, I have to go to class too,” I said, holding the door for her as she walked through. “I’ll be missed, even if you won’t.”

She nodded and walked away, making me jog to catch up with her.

“Nagato-san, you do remember me, don’t you?”

“Of course.” She didn’t look at me.

I wasn’t sure what else to say. “You know that Mikuru and Itsuki are here too?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you...”

The bell sounded for classes to resume and she sped up, away from me.

“We have to meet,” I hissed to her as I ran to catch up again, “After school. Go to...”

“I know where Koizumi Itsuki’s office is,” she said, quietly. “You’ve gone past your classroom, Kyon-sensei.”

I stopped abruptly in the hallway, one arm poised as if to catch her shoulder, but she was already out of my reach. Even though I was running late, I couldn’t look away from her until she’d turned a corner, out of my sight. She didn’t look back once.

 

I struggled through the rest of the day as best I could. Fortunately none of my students really had their minds on Japanese literature either, and were more interested in talking to their neighbours or fidgeting until they could get out in the sun and play again. None of them noticed that I was fidgeting and fumbling as much as they were, murdering line after line of classic literature.

I was the first one back in Itsuki’s office after the bell rang, and waited nervously for the other two to arrive.

It was strange to be in a situation where I really had to talk to Itsuki now. I hadn’t had time to think about it before, when I was in shock and trying to work out what had happened with only a few minutes to spare, but now the minutes stretched on and on as we waited for Mikuru and Nagato.

It seemed like a long wait to me, anyway. Itsuki was talking pleasantly about his day and about the students, barely pausing for breath in his monologue about how he got the job and how he wanted to support one of the clubs, perhaps in theatre or music. He stopped talking the moment I cleared my throat.

“I found Nagato.”

His eyes widened and he turned around to face me.

“Where? How could she be here?”

“She’s a student.”

Itsuki stared. “I suppose... I suppose that makes sense, since she’s able to do that...”

“Yeah. Well. I found her in the old club room. She’s going to come here, too.”

He nodded, and we stared some more, before he started trying to talk about clubs again.

The last time I had spoken Koizumi Itsuki, before today, had been fifteen years ago. Almost as long as since the last time I’d seen Haruhi. He wasn’t at her funeral; he was still in the hospital then. I knew he’d been injured, and badly. I didn’t realise it would be permanent, that all these years later he’d still be in the chair, but it wasn’t really a surprise. I only visited him once in the hospital, and saw him a couple of times at school towards the end of that year. I guess he had to repeat the year, considering how much he missed.

Until now, I hadn’t felt guilty that I never saw him after that, but now it makes me wonder. Should I have gone to the hospital more, or tried to find him after I went off to university? Would it have made things easier for both of us? But then, he never tried to get in contact with me, either.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Mikuru practically waltzed through the door, swinging her handbag, and immediately sat down on the bed. “Shall we get on with it, then?”

“Not yet. We should wait for Nagato.”

“She’s here?” Mikuru looked at me with amazement.

“Yes. She’s a student.” I didn’t feel like explaining the entire thing again, but I went and sat down beside her. “I told her to come by.”

“And she’s still not here?” Mikuru glanced at her watch, with the face on the inside of her wrist. “It doesn’t seem like Nagato to be late.”

“ _You’re_ late.”

“ _I_ care about my students at least a little bit,” she said. “I actually talk to them instead of running out of the classroom to talk to the dashingly attractive school nurse.”

“Why, thank you, Mikuru,” Itsuki smiled at her.

“It’s only the truth,” she grinned back.

I definitely don’t remember these two being such good friends before. What’s been going on since I was gone?

“Oh, nothing,” they both sang at once, and then laughed.

“We’ve just had a good few days to talk since we have a little more commitment to our jobs than you do,” Mikuru stuck out her tongue and rapped me gently on the head.

I do care about my job. I love teaching more than they could understand. There was nothing random about my choice of career, and I certainly didn’t choose it expecting any kind of huge financial benefit. I just didn’t want to come back to North High.

“Fair enough,” Mikuru said, “But I still think you ran out of class way too early because Itsuki’s such hot stuff you just couldn’t wait to come and see him again.”

I glared at her. “My presence here has nothing to do with Itsuki’s attractiveness.”

“So you think he’s attractive?”

“No!” I leaned away from her as she pushed her smug grin towards me. It’s more like I ran out early to spend time with the lovely Asahina-sensei. “No offense, Itsuki.”

The truth was, though, when I looked at him, Itsuki was, if anything, better looking than I remembered from my school days. He hadn’t changed much, just grown a little; he was always taller than me, and even sitting down his head would have been about the height of my chest. His hair was longer than it used to be, and no longer groomed to within an inch of its life. Not that it looked bad; it was just a little unkempt, pleasantly shaggy.

“So should we talk?” Mikuru cocked her head to one side, looking at me. She’d taken her hair out of its ponytail so that it fell down in a fluffy auburn curtain behind her head.

“I guess...”

“I’m happy to see you Kyon, of course I am, but I have to wonder if there are other things we should be worrying about here. If we’re all here, and Nagato’s here too, it must mean something.”

“And as a student, no less,” Itsuki said, with a frown. “That means either she hasn’t aged in fifteen years, or she was terminated and then recreated.”

“She remembered me. That can’t be what happened. If the Integrated Data Thought Entity had terminated her, she wouldn’t remember me, would she?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think Humanoid Interfaces lose their memories when they’re terminated. Asakura didn’t, did she?”

“Asakura wasn’t gone for fifteen years.”

“She could have been aging normally and then been reset to come back here. But the question is, why?”

How should I know? “If there’s something going on, both of you would know from your superiors, wouldn’t you? You’d know better than me. I just came to North High because I was assigned here. If we’re all here at the same time...”

I trailed off as Mikuru and Itsuki both shook their heads. “We were both transferred here, too.”

“Well, I requested the transfer,” Itsuki began. “It was just convenient. I had been teaching at a school closer to Osaka before, but the houses there were so small that I really wasn’t able to move around in them, and I had to live further out to get a house I could live in, but then it was really difficult to get to work...”

Mikuru was shifting restlessly on her hands and I realised that hearing Itsuki talk about his disability made her uncomfortable just the same as it did to me. We’d both lost Haruhi in the accident, but when all was said and done, we walked away from Nishinomiya and forgot about it. Itsuki couldn’t try to block out what happened to Haruhi. It wasn’t even that he had to look at the consequences; he lived them.

“I wanted to come back here,” Mikuru said, softly. “It just felt like it was time to go back and actually think about this again. I decided I couldn’t keep pretending that nothing had happened.”

“Why are you still in this time-frame, Mikuru?” It looked as though Mikuru had aged exactly the same amount that I had, but there was no reason for her to have done that. Had she just been living in the same time frame, going through linear time, for the last fifteen years? “Didn’t the time travellers have other assignments they could give you?”

She laughed. “My superiors don’t want much to do with me anymore. They didn’t suspend my time-travel capabilities or anything, but they withheld permission on all my requests to come back. Occasionally they give me minor tasks, but most of the time I ignore them. I think they expect that now and just give the jobs to somebody else, because so far, nothing has changed.”

I didn’t know what to respond to first, because I couldn’t tell what was more shocking – that Mikuru’s superiors wouldn’t let her come home, or that she’d started ignoring her assignments. I couldn’t imagine Mikuru even thinking about rebellion, and now she did it as a matter of course. But then, wouldn’t anyone’s thoughts turn to such things if they were abandoned in a time away from home?

In the middle of Mikuru’s story, Nagato suddenly walked into the room, sat down in the chair next to Itsuki, and opened a book.

“Now is probably not the time for that, Nagato-san,” he said, gently, showing absolutely no surprise that she was fifteen, wearing glasses and otherwise exactly the same as she had been when we were all at school.

She nodded and looked around at us all. “I’m glad to see you are all here.”

“Did you know we were all going to be here at North High?” Mikuru askedd, warily. I remembered how she used to seem afraid of Nagato. I doubted that there was much that could scare her now, but there was still caution in the way that she looked at the alien. “Because none of us had any idea that we’d meet each other here.”

“Asahina-san and I have both been cut off from our respective superiors to some extent,” Itsuki added, and I turned sharply towards him. The Organisation had cut him off, too?

Nagato’s face gave nothing away. She was as emotionless as when I had first met her. “The Integrated Data Thought Entity is no longer the dominant data life form, so I have little power. I am also a minority amongst the operative human interfaces within the entity.”

“Why’s that?” I tried to remember what she’d told me about her world all those years ago. “I thought you were part of the dominant group. Weren’t the moderates in charge?”

“Yes, they were.”

“So how...?”

“I belong to a different faction now. For the most part, the Integrated Data Thought Entity has given up on the project to plot a path to self-evolution. They believe that only the Canopy has that ability now. They believe that the capacity is denied to us because Haruhi Suzumiya is dead.”

There was a thick, heavy silence hanging over the room after those words. Of course Nagato would be the one to state the truth that we all tried to forget. I tried to ignore the way Mikuru and Itsuki dropped their eyes at the name, to ignore the chill I felt myself, as I kept my gaze on Nagato and cleared my throat.

“Do you believe that you still have the potential without her?”

She looked at me with her clear eyes. “No. I believe that Haruhi Suzumiya is still alive.”

Itsuki looked sad, and Mikuru just snorted. Me, I didn’t know what to feel. The Haruhi in my homeroom class couldn’t be the Haruhi I used to know, the Haruhi I loved. But she could turn out to be just as extraordinary a student as Haruhi Suzumiya once was.

“Nagato, how many members are there in your faction?”

“One.” Her reply was instantaneous.

“And why did you come back to North High? Why now?”

She paused this time. “I do not know. Despite the IDTE’s apathy towards my aims, they didn’t deny me access to any of their information resources. They simply regard me as irrelevant. Consequently, I have been monitoring mutations in data on Earth, and specifically in this area, for the past fifteen years.”

“So you must know why we’re here again,” Itsuki said, urgently. “Why are the four of us gathered here again like this? If you’ve still had access to the IDTE, you must know what’s going on.”

“There have been no unusual mutations in data.” She said, quietly. “There is nothing unusual happening here. Everything about this space is a normal high school.”

“Nagato, why did you come back?” I asked. It seemed as though all the rest of us had come here for their own reasons. I needed the money. For Itsuki it was convenient. For Mikuru, it was boredom.

“I wanted to come back,” she said, after a long pause.

That’s all? No mutations in data indicating Haruhi Suzumiya had returned? Nothing out of the ordinary at all?

“I merely had hoped that in returning to North High I would uncover some clue to discovering the existence or whereabouts of Haruhi Suzumiya that I had not found before now.” She paused. “It was not a rational action.”

“It can’t be coincidence that we’re all here,” Koizumi said, sternly. “Something must have happened. Is it possible that Sasaki...”

“No,” I cut him off. “It’s nothing to do with Sasaki. Nagato’s hunch was right.”

I admit, I had been holding out on them for far too long. I really should have said something before now. But it was embarrassing enough that I had passed out in my very first class without all of them knowing what had shocked me so much. But listening to them pondering the possible cause of our reunion was just getting silly. It was about time.

And really, I thought they would have gotten it by now.

“Haruhi’s here.”

“That’s impossible!”

Mikuru stared at me with shock. Itsuki looked like he didn’t dare to hope that it was true. Nagato’s expression didn’t change at all. I breathed out, slowly, and closed my eyes.

“Her name is Takemoto Haruhi. She’s fifteen. She’s exactly like she used to be.” I had to swallow before I could continue. “She’s in my homeroom class.”

“I see,” Itsuki said, with a half smile. He looked back at me sympathetically.

Why was this always about me?

“Well, now you know,” I crossed my arms and headed towards the door. “Having been unconscious for part of the day and completely unable to pay attention to most of my classes, I really need to get home and start planning for tomorrow.” As well as trying to get my wits together, so that I can face her in the morning without losing my mind again.

“We need to talk about this, Kyon.” Itsuki looked at his watch. “This changes everything. We need to leave here, but we could go to a restaurant, or back to my house. But we have to work out if this is really Haruhi and what we should do about her.”

Suddenly, I just wanted to go home. Seeing Haruhi again, seeing all my old friends again, and all while starting a new job – it would have been exhausting enough without fainting ten minutes into my first class for the year. I’d spent half my life trying to think myself out of this place, trying to forget the supernatural beings that overshadowed my high school career, and wondering whether, if I’d just tried harder, I could have made them all play out differently. There was something strange stirring at North High again, and just like when I was a student, there was probably no way I could escape it. But I could walk away for tonight.

“You guys can talk about whether Haruhi’s real if you want to stay at school all night,” I said, as I walked out the door. “I’m going to get a drink.”

The three of them might not believe in Haruhi’s existence without a data explosion, time quake or Closed Space to prove it. I didn’t need a supernatural disaster to prove to me that Haruhi was back. I just had to look her in the eye.


End file.
